Abstract

This tutorial shows one way to get KDE from trunk running on Linux/BSD systems. There are also tutorials for FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris. This tutorial creates a special user, kde-devel, that will run KDE trunk. On the one hand, this allows other users to continue with another KDE version. On the other hand, testing special system-wide code like the KDE display manager is not possible. There is a tutorial to
set up KDE 4 trunk on a virtual machine.

Throughout the tutorial the bash shell is used.

Warning

Expect a higher risk of build failure on Mondays when most kdelibs changes are committed. Dashboard reports unexpected breakages. You are encouraged to fix failing modules.

Create a user account for KDE4 development

Note

Some people like to have a separate user account for KDE 4 (for instance an old bug deleted files by mistake), and the instructions below were written with that approach.

You can still follow the instructions below, but don't put the environment variables in your .bashrc, put them in a separate file that you source to switch to the KDE 4 environment.

Option 1: Command Line

Note

On some systems a new user is configured by default to use /bin/sh. Using /bin/sh can be very inconvenient to work with and you may want to change it to /bin/bash or another shell.
On Ark Linux and Fedora, you can skip the -s /bin/bash switch - /bin/sh is bash.

useradd -m kde-devel -s /bin/bash
passwd kde-devel

Warning

The new kde-devel user will not be added automatically to all the user groups, which will result in not having sound, not being able to sudo, etc. Edit your /etc/groups file to add the kde-devel user to all the groups that you need (probably the groups that your usual username is already assigned to).

Option 2: Using KControl

Instead of using the commands above, you can also use the User module in the KDE Control Center if you already have KDE3 installed.

Setting up the environment

Copy the ~/.bashrc from your normal user account to the new kde-devel account. Next, copy and paste the contents of the example .bashrc into ~kde-devel/.bashrc. Be sure to comment out the line alias make=makeobj if you do not have the makeobj command available. Alternatively, you can download the kde-sdk package (or perform a subversion checkout) and include the kde-sdk/scripts/ directory in your path. You will probably also want to modify the path to make sure it doesn't include your kde3 paths. Also if you want to use KDevelop to develop KDE 4 applications you may pass the -GKDevelop3 flag to the cmake command (to make CMake generate KDevelop project files, it will help to avoid rebuilding in the future, see this).
To make it run, you have to open a new bash or to execute
source ~/.bashrc

This will provide access to commands such as cmakekde that are used in this tutorial as well as ensure that the proper paths are in place for Qt, KDE and CMake binaries.

Your next compilation step depends on the packages supplied by your distro.

Compiling kde-qt, etc.

If you do not want to use the packages provided by your distro you can compile things like Qt yourself. Instructions for building all dependencies including CMake, Qt4 (kde-qt) and kdesupport are available in the build prerequisites page. Note that automoc, phonon, strigi, soprano, and a few other things are part of kdesupport, so if you have errors about these missing, you'll need to get kdesupport.

Building KDE for development or stable use

The commands below are used to build the latest unstable version of KDE from trunk. This should not be used in a production environment -- not recommended for daily use.

The Recipe

What's Happening

We change to the base source directory (line 1) then make and go into the KDE directory (line 3). We download the sources for kdelibs using subversion (line 4), go into the new ~/kde/src/KDE/kdelibs directory (line 5), and commence the build (line 6). This will leave us in the kdelibs build directory after the build is completed.

Tip

There might be missing dependencies on your system! They are easily overlooked in the output of cmakekde.
You might want to do a cmake $KDE_SRC/KDE/MODULE_NAME prior to compiling any kde modules (like kdelibs, kdepimlibs etc.)

Additional KDE-specific CMake know-how

There are additional CMake modules in kdelibs/cmake/modules/ that are necessary for building KDE4 applications. These will be installed for you when kdelibs itself is installed.

To make a non-debug-release (e.g. suppressing all kDebug() messages), use e.g.

The Recipe

What's Happening

We go into the KDE source directory (line 1), download the source code for kdepimlibs using subversion (line 2) and then go into the new ~/kde/src/KDE/kdepimlibs directory (line 3). We then commence the build (line 4). This will leave us in the kdepimlibs build directory after the build is completed.

Troubleshooting

kdebase

This contains things needed by every application at runtime, like icons. It is a required dependency for each KDE application, so you have to compile and install this.

workspace

This contains things specific to the KDE desktop, like Plasma or the window manager. Most stuff here depends on X11. You only need it if you want to build a full KDE desktop.

You can build all of kdebase at once, which is described in the recipe below. If you only want to build kdebase-runtime, which is the only requirement, you can replace cd kdebase with cd kdebase/runtime in the recipe below.

Troubleshooting

Translations

Most KDE users are going to install translations before being able to use their desktop properly. Full information is given in the Localisation tutorial at Development/Tutorials/Localization/Building_KDE's_l10n_Module.
For a single language, the following receipe installs messages and translated documentation:

Troubleshooting

Generating local API documentation

Staying up to date

In order to keep the kde4 installation up to date, each of the modules installed should be updated periodically. As Monday is the day for big changes in kdelibs, Tuesday may be the best day to do this. For each module checked out, run svn up and make.

For example:
cs kdesupport # cs is not a typo
svn up
cb # cb is not a typo
make install

Note: it is not necessary to run cmakekde for updates.

Installing a subset of a module

Many modules in KDE contain a large number of programs which could take a long time to download and compile. In cases where you want to work only on a particular program or programs in a module, it is possible to download and compile particular folders. In some cases, certain folders are required for any build of the module. This is determined in the CMakeLists.txt file of the module. For example the kdegames CMakeLists.txt file lists:

So, the libkdegames and libkmahjongg directories are required to build any of kdegames. The cmake directory will also usually be required. All the other directories (doc, katomic etc) are optional. They will be built if present on your machine. In this example, we build kmahjongg and kbattleship: